Test case prioritisation aims at finding an ordering which enhances a certain property of an ordered test suite. Traditional techniques rely on the availability of code or a specification of the program under test. We propose to use string distances on the text of test cases for their comparison and elaborate a prioritisation algorithm. Such a prioritisation does not require code or a specification and can be useful for initial testing and in cases when code is difficult to instrument. In this paper, we also report on experiments performed on the "Siemens Test Suite", where the proposed prioritisation technique was compared with random permutations and four classical string distance metrics were evaluated. The obtained results, confirmed by a statistical analysis, indicate that prioritisation based on string distances is more efficient in finding defects than random ordering of the test suite: the test suites prioritized using string distances are more efficient in detecting the strongest mutants, and, on average, have a better APFD than randomly ordered test suites. The results suggest that string distances can be used for prioritisation purposes, and Manhattan distance could be the best choice.

In order to test the control portion of communication software, specifications are usually fll"St abstracted to state machines, then test cases are generated from the resulting machines. The state machines obtained from the specification are often both partially-specified and nondeterministic, but no former work has been reported on test generation for such state machines. We come out with a method of generating test suites for the software that is modeled by partially-specified nondeterministic fmite state machines (PNFSM's). On the basis of intuitive notions, a conformance relation, called quasi-equivalence, is introduced for such machines, which serves as a guide to test generation. Our method is also applicable to completely-specified deterministic machines, partially-specified deterministic machines, and completely-specified nondeterministic machines, which are typical classes of PNFSM's. When applied to such classes of machines, this method yields not greater test suites with full fault coverage for each class of machines than the existing methods for the same class which also provide full fault coverage, when the number of states in implementation machines is bounded by a known integer. The test suites generated by the method can be used to check the conformance relation between a specification and its implementations.

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In this paper, conformance testing of protocols specified as nondeterministic finite state machines is considered. Protocol implementations are assumed to be deterministic. In this testing scenario, the conformance relation becomes a preorder, so-called reduction relation between FSMs. The reduction relation requires that an implementation machine produces a (sub)set of output sequences that can be produced by its specification machine in response to every input sequence. A method for deriving tests with respect to the reduction relation with full fault coverage for deterministic implementations is proposed based on certain properties of the product of specification and implementation machines.

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